Welcome to the Rand Paul evolution
He’ll push to loosen marijuana penalties, legalize undocumented immigrants and pursue a less aggressive American foreign policy.
Call it the Rand Paul Evolution.
In the wake of Barack Obama’s reelection win and ahead of a possible 2016 White House bid of his own, the Kentucky Republican plans to mix his hard-line tea party conservatism with more moderate policies that could woo younger voters and minorities largely absent from the GOP coalition. It’s the latest tactic of the freshman senator to inject the Libertarian-minded views shared by his retiring father into mainstream Republican thinking as the party grapples with its future.
In an interview with POLITICO, Paul said he’ll return to Congress this week pushing measures long avoided by his party. He wants to work with liberal Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Republicans to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for pot possession. He wants to carve a compromise immigration plan with an “eventual path” to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a proposal he believes could be palatable to conservatives. And he believes his ideas — along with pushing for less U.S. military intervention in conflicts overseas — could help the GOP broaden its tent and appeal to crucial voting blocs that handed Democrats big wins in the West Coast, the Northeast and along the Great Lakes.
“We have three big regions where we’re not competitive,” Paul said. “And we have to be competitive in those regions.”
Paul, 49, was elected on the tea party wave that fueled GOP landslide victories in 2010, often declaring on the campaign trail that he had a “message” from the tea party: “We have come to take our government back.”
But two years later, the tea party agenda has stalled in Congress, and House Republicans who ran on that purity platform in 2010 began to tout bipartisan compromises with Democrats in 2012. Nationally, the GOP recognizes it has a demographic problem from New England to the Southwest it needs to correct ahead of the 2014 midterm elections and the next White House race in 2016.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83737.html#ixzz2C7g4bMuR
The Democratic party needs to change its stance on the drug war or else we could find ourselves in trouble.
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